Take five – the soundtrack of my life

It’s my birthday month and I had the best birthday. Usually my birthday gets swamped by Mother’s Day and events or anniversaries. I can’t begin to tell you how special my family and friends made it for me this year. I received a beautiful pencil drawing of my horse drawn by my husband who recently discovered art, a brilliant set of deluxe noise cancelling headphones (thank you everyone), a framed photo of my horse with a complicated plait of his tail hair loving made by our daughter, and a commissioned poem, that brought me completely undone, from my son and daughter-in-law and family . I’ll share it at the end for anyone who would like to read it. I’d add a photo but it was a surprise party, I didn’t even have any lippy on! You’ll have to imagine the look of sheer joy and the floods of tears.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Becoming more ancient got me reflecting on how amazing my life has been and how precious the people in my life are.

Have you seen the show ‘Take five?’ with Zan Rowe. Zan interviews famous musicians and actors and asks them to pick their five favourite songs and then proceeds to dive deep into intimate moments in their lives. It’s a favourite of mine. I wanted to try and do that here this month. Although I’m not a famous musician, as a singer and guitarist, music has played a huge role in my life. I thought I could pick a song for each decade. Turns out most of my favourite songs seem to be from the late 70’s early 80’s with a smattering of the 60’s for good measure. Not one for each decade then. Maybe I could do five. It’s not as easy as it looks on Take Five.

In 1970 I was living in America. Music was going through a huge revolution. The Jackson five were exploding on the scene, Elvis was banned from the waist down on television and I couldn’t get enough of it all. I was fifteen. My parents wouldn’t allow me to go to Woodstock or to see Elvis live in the round. To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have let our kids go either.
We ended our time in America with a few months in Wales to round the year off. Somehow I scored a tiny transistor radio, I think my grandmother bought it for me. I loved that ‘tranny.’ I was glued to it like kids today are glued to their iPads. It transported me to another world. There was a time when I thought my life was over if I didn’t know the number one song. I’d listen to the top one hundred, on the radio, like an addict. I related to songs in the UK like ‘Goodbye’ by Mary Hopkin and ‘Leaving on a jet plane’ by Peter, Paul and Mary. They allowed me to feel the loneliness of travel. I felt constantly wrenched away from friends. It was as if I was always saying goodbye. It was a year filled with amazing experiences and enormous upheaval as I made new friends only to leave them behind again when we moved on.
Leonard Cohen helped me express so many overwhelming feelings and Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell taught me about standing up for myself. In a weird way their protest songs matched my feelings of being misunderstood. I taught myself guitar and wrote terrible songs and played James Taylor ‘You’ve got a friend’ and all of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell’s songs endlessly. I was a folk singer.

Ove the next two years I ran away from home a few times and then I left home for good and moved to Sydney. I was seventeen and completely clueless. I went through more angst trying to find my way in the world while navigating a new city. It would be three years before I was ready to move back to Melbourne.
I still listened to Leonard Cohen. It was around that time I realised Leonard had taken me down into some very dark places and I felt quite lost. His music was having a negative effect on my overall mental health. Drugs, alcohol and a crazy boyfriend didn’t help. Who knew?
One night I went to a party, by myself, as my then boyfriend was in a psychiatric ward, and I was sitting outside, on my own, wondering what I was doing with my life. I wasn’t sure if it was even worth continuing. (You may have gathered I can be quite dramatic) Everyone else was inside having a great time and I was alone in the dark contemplating the meaning of life. Then someone inside changed the music and I heard the Doobie Brothers for the first time. It was ‘Listen to the Music.’ It was booming out from the house and I felt the music fill me with joy. It drew me back from the depths of despair and I made a decision in that moment to only listen to music that made me feel good. I wanted to get back to the ‘feeling groovy’ days when I first heard Simon and Garfunkel on my tinny transistor radio. The days when music set me free and woke up joy on the inside.
I’ve kept to that decision. (And inflicted it on my children)
It’s hard to pick just five songs. I find it hard enough to pick a playlist. There are so many I love. It can’t be that hard can it. Ok, I’ll give it a go, just know that there are heaps missing from this list. Here’s my top five all time favourite songs:

Feeling groovy – Simon and Garfunkel
Such a joy filled sunshine song.

Big Yellow Taxi – Joni Mitchell
Up beat and the little laugh at the end. Love it.

Listen to the Music – The Doobie Brothers
Life saver for me. The clue is in the title.

You’ve Got a Friend – James Taylor
Sweet baby James, I might have been in love with him.

It couldn’t be better – The Ozark Mountain Daredevils
Peace, tranquility, cicadas, it’s a beautiful song that I could listen to on repeat for hours. I’d have this one at my funeral – as my mum used to say :0)

It feels wrong to pick just five. A very big part of me anthropomorphises all the songs I’ve ever heard and I don’t want to hurt their feelings by leaving them off the list. Ok maybe it’s just me.

Music in its many and varied forms has had a powerful influence on me. It has made me sad, brought me joy and all the feelings in-between. I have known musicians who wrote songs that expressed not just their feelings but mine too. What a gift. When they sat down to write those songs they had no idea how or why or when they would influence others. I am so grateful for the artists who took the time to write them down, to record them and to be brave enough to put them out into the world.
It’s funny how songs stick to events isn’t it? It’s a bit like scent. Our memories come flooding back as we hear the starting notes and we are transported to the moment we heard the song. My husband said it’s like time travel, I think he’s right. I can’t write with music playing because I see the images in my mind’s eye and get too distracted. If I play music while I write it has to be instrumental and not too rhythmic. Nothing that will transport me to somewhere else.
I love to hear musicians talk about why they wrote a song and what it means to them. It’s like hearing a writer or an artist talk about their creative process. Something I find endlessly fascinating.

Picking just five was quite a challenge and it makes me wonder what your top five are. Do you time travel with songs or is it just me?
Here is the birthday poem I was telling you about. A little backstory: I called myself Sera-Jane Fraser as a teenager so no one would know the poetry, stories and songs were mine if anyone found my notebook.

‘There is a quiet magic
in watching someone raised by storm clouds
choose not to rain on anyone else.
It’s an unaccompanied magic
no wand, no hat, no abracadabra
(although a little theatricality
never hurt anyone)
but you raised us, mostly, with brass lungs,
bare feet and the audacity to love, anyway.
You, with your patchwork soul,
marvel of mischief and might,
Sera-Jane Fraser in secret,
glitter-smeared compass in truth.
You didn’t just break the cycle,
you fed it soup,
gave it therapy,
built a home where the walls giggled
and even the fireplace knew to stay up past its bedtime.
So doesn’t it make perfect sense
that you want to spend your twilight years
writing stories for children.
Rhiannon, you’ve been a children’s book
this whole time,
a pop-up one, probably
with fold out fairies in the bluebells
and puppets in the pantry
and now, with time in your soft, dancing hands
you’re writing it down.
Thank goodness you’re writing it down.
So here we are, with our breathless,
joy-soaked thank you
not just for the puppets or the pop-ups, but
for turning sharp edges into soft landings,
chaos into creativity.
For being the riot that raised us,
the song that soothed us
the proof
that a life lived in colour is a revolution
and the only reason any of us are still marching,
Is you. ‘

Written by Georgie Jones: Instagram: @Georgie_Jonez

Amazing right? Now, I suggest we all go and make some playlists and spend some time allowing the magic of music transport us to other places and times. We all know music is healing right?

Thanks for reading, see you next time.